On Thursday, Charles Dolan, a longtime Democratic operative, admitted during his testimony that he had lied to Igor Danchenko in 2016 when he claimed to have inside knowledge about Paul Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign from a Republican source. In reality, Dolan had learned this information from open source reporting, which was later used in the dossier and attributed to “an American political figure associated with Donald Trump.”
Dolan testified during the trial of Danchenko, a Russian national who was the main sub-source for former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele’s anti-Trump dossier.
Danchenko was charged on five counts by Special Counsel John Durham of lying to the FBI. To all accusations, Danchenko has entered a not guilty plea.
Durham’s team discovered an email from Danchenko to Dolan dated August 19, 2016, during the course of the interrogation, in which Danchenko requested Dolan provide any inside information on Manafort’s resignation as the chairman of the Trump campaign.
“I am working on a related project against Trump,” Danchenko wrote. “It is an important project for me… Our goals clearly coincide.”
I thought they told us it was Trump who colluded with the Russians? Clearly, it was Hillary Clinton who colluded with the Russians.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELDolan testified that he believed Danchenko was alluding to the fact that he is a Democrat and potentially alluding to his opinion of Donald Trump.
Durham asked if Dolan has “an opinion on Donald Trump?”
Dolan replied: “Yes.”
“What is it?” Durham asked.
Dolan said: “Well…fairly negative.”
On August 19, 2016, Dolan responded to Danchenko: “Let me look into Manafort some more. The new team probably wanted him gone and used today’s NYT report to put a spike through his heart.”
The following day, Dolan sent Danchenko another email, saying, “I had lunch with a GOP friend who knows the players.”
Dolan continued by informing Danchenko that Corey Lewandowksi, who ran Trump’s campaign during the 2016 Republican primary elections, “hates Manafort,” and that after his resignation he was, “doing a happy dance… it is a very sharp elbows crowd.”
However, under questioning on Thursday, Dolan revealed that he never actually spoke to a GOP source and that he instead learned about the GOP via open sources, particularly cable news. It’s known that networks like CNN and MSNBC lied daily and repeatedly about Trump since the moment he came down the escalator to announce he was running for president.
“I thought I’d embellish a bit,” Dolan testified Thursday. He added that Lewandowski “hating” Manafort was “pretty common” knowledge at the time.
Danchenko reworded the information from Dolan’s email and added it to his report from August 22, 2016, which later became part of the Steele dossier.
“An American political figure associated with Donald Trump and his campaign outlined the reasons behind Manafort’s recent demise,” the dossier said. “S/he said it was true that the Ukraine corruption revelations had played a part in this but also, several senior players close to Trump had wanted Manafort out, primarily to loosen his control on strategy and policy formulation.”
“Of particular importance in this regard was Manafort’s predecessor as campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who hated Manafort personally and remained close to Trump, with whom he discussed the presidential campaign on a regular basis,” the dossier added.
The report was released by Buzzfeed News in January 2017. They admitted they didn’t verify the story, but they ran it, anyway. Dolan said in his testimony on Thursday that he was concerned when he saw it because he thought Danchenko might have been involved given his links to Steele.
Dolan claimed in his testimony that he was unaware that information he sent to Danchenko was included in the dossier until Durham summoned him for an interview as part of his inquiry into the beginnings of the Trump-Russia investigation.
Dolan claimed Durham had shown him the email and the dossier side by side, and Dolan had concurred that the two appeared “identical.”
Steele created the dossier, which was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee via law firm Perkins Coie and ordered by opposition research firm Fusion GPS. It was really Danchenko’s dossier, since he was the guy who was collecting the information. The scumbag Democrats involved used Chris Steele for his gravitas as a former British spy to lend credibility to the dossier with the FISA court to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page. They used what is known as the two-hop rule, which means anyone who has a FISA warrant on them, the FBI agents could also spy on anyone the target of the FISA warrant had contact with. Being a former campaign volunteer, Page had contact with many people in the campaign.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant and its three extensions against Page were based on the dossier.
The dossier, according to DOJ Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz in 2019, was used to support the initial FISA warrant and then its three renewals. The dossier, according to Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, was the initial justification for the warrants and Page’s surveillance.
After accounting for the FBI’s false information, the Department of Justice (DOJ) acknowledged in 2020 that there was no probable cause for the FISA warrants against Page. That’s probably because they lied to the FISA court with a dossier filled with garbage information.
FBI supervisory counterintelligence analyst Brian Auten, Durham’s first witness during the Danchenko trial this week, confessed that neither the FBI nor any other intelligence agency — or even Steele himself — had any corroborating evidence for the claims made in the dossier.
“You and your colleagues took the information…and put it in the Carter Page FISA application,” Durham said. “You didn’t have corroboration from FBI databases, from other intelligence community agencies, or from Christopher Steele and it still went into a FISA application?”
“Correct,” Auten testified.
Auten claimed that Steele was even given a $1 million offer by the FBI in 2021 to support the claims, but that Steele was unable to do so.
To sum it all up, the Obama administration thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win the White House in 2016. That belief gave the operatives in the FBI and their informants the confidence to do whatever it took to take Trump down even if that meant breaking rules and laws because they knew with Hillary in the Oval Office it would all be swept under the rug and would have remained in the darkness of evil.
